Stickers
Ninety-four laptop stickers, photographed and cut out by the lab's own pipeline (Apple Vision for the outline, a colour mask where Vision gave up, a convex hull of the printed colour for the one shot through a plastic sleeve, a taper correction for the ones shot at an angle, grey-world white balance for the one the camera turned blue, an illumination flatten for the one shot on dark wood with a shadow across it, a quarter turn for the bumper sticker photographed on its side, and a circle fit for the two still sitting on their backing squares). The old ones are from the early cloud years; the new ones are from the bench this month. Pinned to a cork board because that is where stickers go when they are not on a laptop.
Marks belong to their owners; these are photographs of Alex's own stickers. The cut-outs also appear beside the work they came from on Work and Certifications.
Alex
Vintage
- RightScale: All your cloud are belong to us.VintageThe card from RightScale, 2013: Alex's first cloud-era role, at a company doing multi-cloud orchestration before the word multicloud existed. The joke was already old; it still lands.
- RightScale: My laptop scales more servers than yours.VintageLaptop sticker from the same year. The boast was the whole pitch.
- RightScale: When size matters.VintageThe third of the set. Subtlety was not the house style.
- Amazon CloudFront: Your content, delivered. Fast.VintageAn early CDN card from the years CloudFront was new and re:Invent was small.
- Amazon CloudFront: Take it to the edge.VintageIts sibling. The edge meant something smaller then.
- Internap (INAP)VintageCloud Solutions Architect there, 2015 to 2018: private cloud, bare metal, hybrid, OpenStack.
- Rubrik robotVintageThe backup robot from the Rubrik year, 2018 to 2019, Systems Engineer for the Pacific Northwest channel.
- Seattle Nutanix User GroupVintageThe user group Alex founded, running for more than five years; the sticker went on every laptop in the room.
- AWS Certified Solutions Architect AssociateVintageThe associate credential. The sticker has outlived more than one exam version.
- AWS Certified Solutions Architect ProfessionalVintageThe second. Harder exam, same sticker size.
- Unikitty: THE CLOUDVintageA LEGO Movie sticker that says THE CLOUD, kept for the right reasons. It sits on the home page beside the real ones.
- Xi Frame: The Light Side of VDIVintagefeat. “Any Cloud You Like”. The prism is borrowed from a 1973 album cover; the cube is Nutanix's.
- AOS: Acropolis Operating SystemVintageAOS, spelled out.
- OpenStack Corporate SponsorVintageCut from behind a binder sleeve; the circle is the silhouette.
New
- Nutanix: Simply MagicNewThe unicorn. Every Nutanix certification on this site wears it.
- Cloud Native Computing FoundationNewMembership, and the Kubernetes years that came with it.
- DockerNewThe whale. It went on the laptop the week containers stopped being optional.
- PrometheusNewThe torch; the monitoring project that made scraping a verb.
- Serverless Workflow SpecificationNewThe CNCF spec sticker, tall and narrow, cut at its real angle.
- AcornNewThe app-packaging project; the sticker needed a colour mask to cut, the acorn is the same brown as its shadow.
- PineconeNewThe vector database, drawn as the cone it is named for.
- Hugging FaceNewThe model hub. The last letter fell off the first cut and had to be recovered.
- TensorFlowNewThe orange TF; the photo's white balance had turned it blue and grey-world brought it back.
- ClaudeNewThe wordmark of the model that runs Waku.
- OpenCV AI KitNewThe vision kit on the AI bench.
- FinOps 4 LifeNewThe anchor; the discipline that pays for the rest of the lab.
- Aviatrix Certified EngineerNewThe ACE hexagon, from the multicloud networking certification in 2021. Transit gateways and overlay routing across three clouds, back when each one wanted you to learn its own.
- KubernetesNewThe helm, seven spokes on a blue heptagon. The thing the lab is still learning rather than teaching.
- AnthropicNewThe company name, plain sans-serif on a pill. The lab already had Claude's own mark; this is the one above it.
- AerospikeNewIn-memory NoSQL, built for real-time throughput at scale. Not in the current stack, but the kind of latency problem worth keeping a sticker for.
- CNINewContainer Network Interface: the spec that lets a dozen networking plugins each claim to work with Kubernetes. Nobody reads it until routing breaks.
- CockroachDBNewDistributed SQL that survives a datacenter dying, named for the thing it's built to outlast.
- CouchbaseNewDocument database with a cache built into its instincts. One of the NoSQL names that showed up at every conference booth for the same five years.
- Engineering For KidsNewA STEM franchise, King County chapter. The URL printed on the sticker is from an era when you'd actually type it in.
- FinOps Certified PractitionerNewThe FinOps Foundation's entry credential. Cost has to be read before it can be cut.
- Google CloudNewThe four-color ring. GCP earned its own icon once it stopped needing to draw an actual cloud.
- HashiCorpNewTerraform's parent company, the bracket-H mark from before the brand split into a dozen separate product logos.
- HelmNewThe wheel, package manager for Kubernetes. Sailing metaphors outlived the ships they came from.
- MongoDB AtlasNewThe leaf wrapped like a mummy. Document database as a managed service, the operations work moved onto somebody else's cluster.
- OPNFVNewOpen Platform for NFV, a Linux Foundation project chasing interoperable network functions virtualization before SDN absorbed the acronym.
- Orca SecurityNewCloud security posture management, agentless. No relation to the lab's other orca.
- PuppetNewConfiguration management from before Kubernetes made half of the job unnecessary. Still running somewhere.
- RancherNewKubernetes cluster management, from Rancher Labs before SUSE bought it.
- SnykNewThe doberman: dependency scanning that finds the vulnerable package nobody meant to ship.
- TAG App DeliveryNewCNCF's App Delivery Technical Advisory Group. The kangaroo carries more working groups than any one person should track.
- VantageNewCloud cost visibility, printed in holographic foil, because somebody in swag procurement had a sense of humor about FinOps.
- ArctiCon 2019NewA skyline pressed into the die-cut and a year. The event itself didn't leave more of a paper trail than the sticker did.
- AINewA plain black lettermark, two letters: AI. No logo attached to it, just the word itself, which is honest enough about where the lab's attention has been.
- HashiCorpNewThe actual mark: a hexagon with the H cut out of it in negative space. The bracket-H sticker elsewhere on this page is an older mark from the same company.
- GitHubNewThe Octocat, redrawn in a synthwave palette: sunset gradient behind a cat silhouette instead of the usual black-and-white mark.
- Hands-On LabsNewA cloud die-cut with three beakers bubbling inside it and the words Hands-On Labs along the bottom. The only other mark is a green-and-blue chevron carrying a ™, with no name beside it; the vendor it belongs to is not identified here.
- BootcampsNewThe companion to the Hands-On Labs cloud: same die-cut, a rack unit inside it instead of beakers, a row of five product glyphs along the bottom and the same unnamed green-and-blue chevron. Whoever printed the pair did not put their name on either.
- Apache CloudStackNewOpen-source IaaS orchestration, blue fading into a row of cloud scallops with the project URL across them. Ran real hypervisors for real hosting providers while the conference talks were still arguing about what a cloud was.
- Apigee: I ♥ APIsNewA bumper sticker, not a laptop one, which is why it is the wrong shape for this board. It carries both marks along the bottom, Apigee's own and Google Cloud's, so it was printed after the acquisition rather than before.
- AWS Certified, ten yearsNewA holographic 10 in a neon ring with an ANNIVERSARY banner across it. The certification programme lasted long enough to print its own commemorative, which is more than most of the services on it managed.
- KCNANewKubernetes and Cloud Native Associate, the entry-level badge in the CNCF stack, cut as a blue seal. The one exam on the shelf that is about vocabulary rather than fingers on a keyboard.
- Nutanix CalmNewApplication automation and lifecycle management, drawn as a blueprint frame with a check mark going round in a loop. The product name was a promise about what the automation was supposed to do to the operator.
- DatabricksNewThe red stacked bricks and the wordmark, die-cut tight. Spark grew a company, the company grew a lakehouse, and the lakehouse grew a sales motion.
- FluentdNewThe blue bird and the wordmark. A CNCF unified logging layer: one collector in front of a dozen destinations, so the log pipeline stops being rewritten every time the backend changes.
- GitLab: DevSecOpsNewA dark lozenge with the word spelled out and the handle tucked in the corner. Three disciplines welded into one noun, which is either an operating model or a procurement category depending on who is holding the sticker.
- GitLab Duo with Amazon QNewTwo vendors on one square: the GitLab fox, the Duo mark and Amazon's assistant, rendered as a glossy black card with a play button in the corner. Co-marketing gets its own sticker before the integration gets its own docs.
- LogRocketNewSession replay and front-end monitoring, white rocket on violet. Watching the recording of the user's bug is undignified and faster than reading the ticket they filed about it.
- TrilioNewBackup and recovery for OpenStack and Kubernetes, a green disc with a restore arrow ghosted behind the wordmark. Data protection is the part of the platform nobody demos and everybody eventually needs.
- Redis: Call your mom. Not LLMs.NewA caching pitch delivered as filial guilt. The argument underneath it is sound: the cheapest inference call is the one you already answered.
- Redis: No RAGretsNewIts sibling, and the worse pun of the two, which is saying something. Vector search shipped and marketing reached straight for the bad tattoo.
- #NoMouseNewA mouse under the red circle-and-slash, a hashtag and a domain. Keyboard-only as a movement, badge included, from people who would rather learn a modal editor than reach eight inches to the right.
- Delivery truckNewA grey box truck die-cut with an orange and white ring broken into segments on the side panel. No wordmark anywhere on it; the vendor is not identified here.
- NutanixNewA white hexagon carrying a blue cube in outline with lime axes meeting at the centre, so the hexagon and the cube are the same silhouette read two ways. The older Nutanix mark, printed without a wordmark — identified from the mark itself, since nothing on the sticker names it.
- Keyhole and orbitsNewAn orange keyhole at the centre of two broken rings, three orange dots riding them. It reads as a security mark, but nothing on the sticker says so and the vendor is not identified here.
- ClaudeNewClaude in eight-bit blocks — Anthropic's orange, four stubby legs, and the pixel sunglasses that have meant one thing on the internet since about 2010. No wordmark anywhere on it; the sticker expects you to know the shape.
- RUN AHVNewTwo red bars and a hypervisor. You know the band.
- AHV: top dog for virtualizationNewThe gramophone dog, borrowed for a hypervisor.
- Nutanix (flames)NewSkate-shop lettering for a storage company.
- Nutanix: Wipe away your tiersNewA tissue box for the tiers. The pun is the architecture: no storage tiers to manage.
- Nutanix XNewThe big X, cut from behind a binder sleeve.
- Nutanix Higher GroundNewGlobal Tech Summit.
- Nutanix Nordics Systems EngineeringNewThe Nordic SE team's crest.
- Rubrik (skyline)NewThe wordmark with a city inside it.
- Microsoft AzureNewThe A.
- Azure Cosmos DBNewThe planet with two hearts.
- Azure Cosmos DB (ring)NewThe same planet, in orbit text.
- SplunkNewsplunk>
- Cloudbase SolutionsNewdream. code. commit.
- LucidchartNewtake a nap? yes: right choice. no: wrong, try again.
- LucidsparkNewbrb // in a sticky situation.
- GitHub Copilot CLINewWelcome to GitHub Copilot, CLI version.
- Robot, blue eyesNewCame with the Copilot stickers; no maker printed on it.
- GitHub Copilot (goggles)NewThe Copilot head, large.
- Microsoft (robot)NewThe small one, with a double chevron on its chest.
- GitHub Copilot (disc)NewThe goggled head on a green-to-purple disc.
- Take control of your data monsterNewNo maker printed on the front; the eyes do the talking.
- GitLabNewThe mark on its own, no wordmark. Officially a tanuki; everyone calls it the fox.
- Microsoft (holographic pixel)NewA pixel figure on holographic foil, so every photo of it comes out a different colour.
